Diseases are global, so it’s time for global emergency response

It takes a global village

Sameer Al-Doumy/AFP/Getty Images

DISEASE is coming back. This week alone, emergencies in five countries – Iraq, Nigeria, South Sudan, Syria and Yemen – reached the highest grade on the World Health Organization’s scale. That means they have the potential for “substantial public health consequences” – international ones.

But no international agency can yet step in and fix these crises, never mind prevent them. So far even the WHO hasn’t been able to. It was not designed for handling emergencies, but to provide nations with technical health advice. It is a global agency, but until recently most disease outbreaks

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